Can your nail polish shade predict stock prices?

Forget hemlines, your nail polish will tell you the shape of the economy.

We’ll explain. While hemlines are often referenced as a marker of economic rise and fall, referred to as the hemline index, there’s a school of thought that suggests a new indicator may have real clout; your nail polish colour.

In an article by Forbes ] a link has been drawn between frugal periods and dark nail polish. The idea could be a replacement for the aforementioned hemline theory, formulated by economist George Taylor in 1926 and fondly (and innumerably) referenced by fashion industry commentators. Taylor observed that the shorter the hems, the higher the stock prices- when women preference shorter, more risqué skirt lengths, they were feeling impulsive and willing to spend.

To nails: Dark polish was favoured by bright young things in the 1920s, a period of comparable growth, but one, Forbes explains, where apparent boom was masking an eventual unravel toward the great depression. In the 1930s, dark nails continued their ubiquity amongst the financially desolated populace, and Revlon began producing the claret bestseller ‘Cherries in the Snow.’

In the 1960s, when the economy was on the up pale polish matched the nude lips favoured by the mods and Mary Quant devotees, seen on the likes of Twiggy, Mia Farrow and Pattie Boyd.

In the late 70’s Bianca Jagger was spotted with dark tips. In 1976, the economy crashed.

In the 1980s sugary pink nails became de rigueur once more, and the Reagan era boom ensued. In the 90s, dark red and black were in vogue, Tom Ford sent dark-nailed beauties down the runway at Gucci and Chanel offered the Pulp Fiction, blood red sell-out ‘vamp’.

Despite the parallels, the hemline theory has been decried by many and debunked from their perspective; naysayers claim that hemlines were not defined by a mood of frivolity and far from frugal behaviour, but rather, by the amount of fabric available at the time.

As for nails, much like fashion, trends come and go in increasingly faster rotations, so for every trend (nail art), there’s simultaneously a counter-trend (nude nails). But theory is far from useless. It might just hold when applied to our individual micro-economies; we know our pockets are certainly lighter after an encounter with the newest powder pink polish.

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